From the 1st of July 2018, employers with 20 or more employees will be required to report payments such as salaries and wages, pay as you go (PAYG) withholding and super information in real time. Businesses with 19 or less employees will have another year to comply (1st of July 2019). You can choose to start complying with this regulation before legally required in order to make sure you are ready for the changes.
It means that Payroll items will be reported by your accounting/payroll software each and every payday. This information will then be stored by the ATO and made available to employees on My Gov at tax time, reducing the need to complete payment summaries at year end.
The ATO has recommended that you do a headcount on the 1st of April 2018 to determine if you are going to need to be ready this year or next. If you need to be ready this year, then you will need to make sure your accounting/payroll software is ready.
These changes emphasis the need to bring all of your payroll information up to date and keep it updated. If you are not currently using software that integrates with the ATO and you have employees, we can help you to get up to date and stay that way. It is now becoming clear that the ATO will be making sure business owners are meeting their obligations at all times, not at the end of the year or every quarter when it may be too late.
Supervision is here to help, so please contact us to make an appointment or speak to one of our accounting team.
